Nonprofits raised 10 percent more revenue online in 2019 than the year before, according to a survey of 201 nonprofits released Thursday by M+R, an online fundraising and marketing firm that works with nonprofits. That bump looks promising — especially after the mere 1 percent online-revenue growth rate in 2018 — but the future of online giving is still murky. Nonprofits have yet to find out just how the coronavirus pandemic will affect online fundraising this year.
The survey found a 1 percent increase in the share of people who received fundraising emails from nonprofits and made donations through their links in 2019 compared with the previous year — the first time in the survey’s 14-year history that those indicators reported positive growth. That readiness to engage with email marketing could be one factor explaining the jump in online revenue.
However, few email recipients made a gift once they reached the donation page via email. The share who gave fell 19 percent from 2018 levels, landing at just over 10 percent of email recipients last year.
Facebook Boost
GivingTuesday was a bright spot in 2019 online fundraising, especially on Facebook. For the past two years, Facebook has offered to match the first $7 million in gifts to fundraising drives on the social-media site. Last year, Facebook processed $120 million in donations on GivingTuesday.
End-of-year giving on Facebook has helped the site reach heavyweight status in online fundraising, according to the report. In 2019, Facebook processed 3.5 percent of all nonprofit revenue raised online; 26 percent of those donations were made in November and December.
Nonprofits are gearing up for GivingTuesdayNow, a flash-fundraising event on May 5, organized by GivingTuesday to attract donations for charities trying to recover revenue losses and meet increased demands on services caused by the coronavirus. How that giving day will affect online fundraising levels in 2020 is a question for next year.
Valverde doesn’t expect nonprofits to see the same level of contributions on GivingTuesdayNow that they would on a typical GivingTuesday, but he says that’s no reason to sit out the day. “This is a time where we can’t be hesitant to try new things and to jump on whatever opportunities present themselves,” he said.
Facebook has not announced plans to match gifts made on its platform on May 5. But M+R’s 2019 findings show that Facebook has gained a foothold in online fundraising. In the health sector, nearly 10 cents of every dollar raised online in 2019 came from a gift to a Facebook fundraising drive.
The flip side to those contributions, as the report notes, is that many of those Facebook donors slip through nonprofits’ fingers, as charities can’t collect their email addresses to continue communicating with them after they’ve made their gift.
What’s more, charities’ audiences aren’t growing much on Facebook. Last year, they grew only 4 percent, according to the report. Support from text-message appeals, on the other hand, grew significantly. The nonprofits in the study reported reaching 26 percent more people through text messages last year than they did in 2018.
It’s still technologically challenging to track how many people who made a mobile donation did so because of a text message from the charity, but M+R reports that 4.2 percent of people who received a text message from a nonprofit clicked on the link to the donation form.
Among the other findings:
- Last year, 44 percent of visitors to a nonprofit’s website arrived there on their own — not through an ad or an email. But just one in every 588 of those visitors proceeded to make an online donation.
- Half of the visitors to a nonprofit’s website in 2019 did so on their cellphone, an 11 percent increase over 2018 levels.
- Fundraising revenue from gifts on Facebook grew 6 percent in 2019. An overwhelming share of those gifts — 97 percent — came from fundraising drives in which Facebook users appealed for donations from their peers.
- In 2019, paid search ads provided nonprofits the highest return on their investment: $3.59 for every $1 spent. Display and social-media ads were neck and neck, yielding 74 cents and 70 cents, respectively, for every dollar invested.
